Amir and Blind Testing

Our hearing, or actually our brain’s hearing center, adapts ... sort of like our eyes adapt to low light levels. And the hearing center has no memory, like the smell center has, when you smell something that you smelled once years ago, you know you smelled this before.

For an AB test to work it must be possible to make the switch instantly. At the very moment of the switch you can hear the difference ... if there is any.

After a while our brain takes over and we really don’t know what is happening in those grey cells. You can still decern if you like a particular sound, or if you don’t, over time, but to hear subtle differences, instantaneous switching is the only way.

I once wasted my time watching a video “review” of some audiophile switches. It was half an hour of blah blah blah about how his measurements demonstrated without a shadow of a doubt that there was absolutely no measurable difference between X Y and Z switches therefore it was impossible to hear any difference so it was all in your small “audiophile” brain, his mantra so to speak. Then he went on to briefly demo the switches he had just “measured” in his (joke of a) system. And guess what: he could clearly hear a difference. His wife could hear a difference. According to him the audiophile switches sounded significantly and audibly worse.
 

Without realising he had just contradicted and refuted his half hour case for “it’s in your head”. If he accepts that his experience contradicts his measurements, for better or worse, then his measurements are flawed. For me Amir became irrelevant after that video.

@reven6e And guess what: he could clearly hear a difference. His wife could hear a difference. 

Please supply a link to this video review.  I'd enjoy watching it, not least because I've not witnessed Amir bringing his wife in for a hearing experiment - was it an A/B blind test?

Amir appears believe we all suffer from expectation bias.  One  problem how does that explain when the expectation is for things to sound no better or worse but they don't?

Blind testing works for components that have a wider spread of differentiation. It works for "preferences" as in which spaghetti sauce do you like. You can tell that immediately.

The trouble w extended listening is audio memory is the shortest memory we have and differences are more nuanced. There, "preferential comparison" (flavor of presentation over weeks or months) might be harder to assess except to say "I never noticed that before" in terms of sound articulation.

Even this cannot be written in stone as everyone’s brain is different.

What we hear is often compelled by desire of what we want to hear (expectation bias).

There is an aspect that adds further confusion to the process...chance.  What would be an interesting experiment is if the aspect of "gamble" or "skin in the game" or "taking a chance" was eliminated because spending larger amounts of money on higher end stuff creates conflict of interest in my mind.

I cannot tell you the amount of times people coming into our salons, agonized over a decision when A/B (or C and D etc,) comparison differences were not as stand out between what they were listening to. Even taking things home for try out did not completely eliminate this conflict between money spent and objective/subjective auditory acquisition as the listener could not escape that big money was about to be spent at some point.

For the well healed, this aspect did not loom as large.